Holiday seasons are festive events encouraging the decoration of buildings. Historically, strings of ornamental lights have been popular trimming devices attached to indoor and outdoor trees, fences, building edges and corners, door jambs, window edging, walls and the like. A tremendous amount of ingenuity is displayed in the decorative placement of these ornamental lighting strings.
Two designs of ornamental light strings have become popular, serially powered and parallelly powered. In both designs, there are first and second adjacent conductors or wires. Serially powered light strings have each individual light element electrically attached in a serial fashion to adjacent light elements linearly along the conductors. Thus, when a single light element fails, the light string circuit is interrupted preventing all of the light elements from emitting. Parallelly powered light strings have each individual light element attached at one end to the first conductor and attached at an opposite end to the second conductor, forming a "ladder" type of electrical circuit. Thus, when a single light element fails, the light string circuit is not interrupted and only the failed light element ceases to emit. Male and female power plug members may be provided at opposite ends of the two conductors or at a single end.
In decorating buildings, multiple light strings are often serially connected forming a single extended length of light strings. However, there are many instances in ornamentation when a gap in the lighting string is desired. For example, the space found between letters and words or the like should not be illuminated to create the illusion of discrete letters and words.
If parallelly powered light strings are used for the decoration, a single bulb in the string may be loosened or removed where the gap is desired. However, this practice is disfavored for safety and other reasons.
Therefore, it would be useful to create a device that masks or prevents the emission of light from individual light elements of a string without electrically interrupting the light string electrical circuit or creating other problems.
A review of related art shows several examples of devices created for use with ornamental light strings and individual light elements. The most common devices found are transparent covers that protect an enclosed light element. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,184,890 issued to Chen et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,174 issued to Lin; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,517,394 also issued to Lin.
Other types of devices partially or temporarily occlude light emission from light sources. Examples of this type of device are found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,083,251 issued to Parker. The Parker patent details a thermochromic coating for incandescent light bulbs or the like. As the thermochromic coating heats up, such as when the light bulb is turned on, the coating or cover becomes progressively more transparent thereby serving as an automatic intensity rheostat. Another example is U.S. Pat. No. 5,274,537 issued to Altman. The Altman patent details ornamental light covers that partially occlude the emission of light. Much of the ornamentality of these devices depends upon at least partial emission of light.
However, none of the found related art teaches or discloses devices that would allow selective occlusion of specific lights in an ornamental lighting string. Therefore, it would be an advantage to provide a device that quickly and easily creates a lighting void or gap in a lighting string.